Happy All Souls Day! The temptation of bad holiday foods is upon us, and our ancestors would be appalled. If you are anything like me, the easy availability of candy is bad news. Let me be the first to tell you to GET RID OF IT today instead of letting it sit around and tempt you into sugar addiction.

The problem with candy is that it is made out of sugar. Sugar has many names, but it has the same effects. It doesn't matter if it's called honey, agave syrup, corn syrup or rice syrup, it still makes us crave more. And that is BAD NEWS.

It works like this. Eating too much sugar (and even a little it usually too much) causes an imbalance in our insulin and leptin levels. That imbalance causes us to feel hungry when we don't need food. That false hunger feeling, which can be a very strong craving, causes us to eat more and worse foods than we normally would. Uncontrolled eating worsens the imbalance which then leads to weight gain, pre-diabetes and diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and all manner of bad news.

The GOOD NEWS is that this pattern of craving is easy to reverse. If you start your day by NOT eating sugar, you can stop the cravings for that day. If you keep your sugar and carb intake low day after day, the cravings will disappear completely. You will find that you aren't really a sugar addict after all.

Eggs and bacon are a great anti-craving breakfast, especially if you keep the portions of potatoes, breads and such small. Even oatmeal is a far better breakfast than a pastry, or even a bagel, sorry to say. The worst possible breakfast in the universe is Halloween candy, so get rid of it! Throw it in the trash. Cheap sugary candy is the devil and you do not want to give it to anyone that you care about.

One small note about chocolate. People have the idea that chocolate is actually good for you, and this is true, but it has to be a certain kind of chocolate, AND you can't eat very much of it. Hershey's bars are more sugar and rancid milk than they are chocolate, so they are NOT good for you. Very dark (strong) chocolate, eaten one square at a time (not a whole bar!), is the only kind of chocolate that you can claim is good for you. And that is not the kind of chocolate that people give out at Halloween.

I hope this has been enough to get you started in the right direction. Throw away the leftover candies, and brush your teeth. Let your kids binge on sugar all at once until they feel sick, then get rid of the rest and make them brush their teeth too. Return to eating whole foods (fruit and veggies) as soon as possible! This Halloween curse can be beaten!

The long version on this topic went out in a newsletter, but for those of you who are not subscribed, here’s a quick checklist of ways that you can reduce your dependence on drugstore remedies during allergy season. Now that we know benadryl can contribute to dementia, the last thing we want to do is take that every day.

1. Tolerate some symptoms.A runny nose is rinsing allergens out of your head, and that is good.If you want to help your runny nose do its job instead of taking some drug that dries you up and makes the allergens stay in there, try using a neti pot.

2. Exercise daily.Cardio immediately changes the balance of your immune system and makes you better able to fight infections and less prone to hayfever.

3. Eat a clean diet rich in fruit, veggies and fresh fish, and limited in meat and cheese.Mangos, blueberries, cherries, raspberries, ginger and hot peppers have been shown to reduce allergies.Fast food, leftover fish, and aged meat and cheese definitely increase allergies.Kids who eat fast food have a much higher risk of developing allergic asthma.

4. Limit allergic exposures.This includes changing your sheets and dusting your house, cutting back on foods you are sensitive to, not using soaps that you sometimes react to, wiping down your pets, and generally trying to live in a minimal-allergen environment.

5. Increase Omega 3 fatty acids—You can take fish oil or you can change your diet to consume more fresh fish and certain nuts and seeds, specifically walnuts, chia, flax and hemp. Eggs are allowed because there are omega 3’s in the yolk.

6. Be nice to your intestines because leaky gut is another allergy trigger.Avoid stress, eat fermented foods, avoid NSAIDS, and keep going back to that clean diet with lots of veggies. Make sure you are eliminating every day. A happy intestine reduces your risk of allergies and autoimmune disease.​7. If you drink alcohol, go easy on beer and wine and try mixing drinks with clear liquors instead.Wine contains sulfites which worsen allergies. Gin contains juniper berries which are a fairly strong anti-allergy medicine.And there’s something about gin and tonics that’s perfect when the weather turns warm.

Most of us don't eat enough fruit and veggies. It's so easy to eat processed stuff and meat and cheese instead. It takes effort to eat a healthy diet. I happen to agree with Michael Pollan who wrote "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." But how can we safely eat mostly plant matter when it has toxic chemicals sprayed on it?

There are several tricks to getting or making clean food. The first and most obvious is to grow it yourself. Unfortunately gardening is time-consuming, and you can't get tomatoes in winter. Some folks can't or won't grow food. Grow what you can when you can, and forgive yourself when you can't. Home-grown tomatoes are one of the great pleasures in life.

If you're not going to grow it yourself, perhaps you have a job that will allow you to buy clean organic produce. There's more of it available all the time. If you have a local source of produce that isn't organic certified but is still cleaner than grocery store produce, use that. Farmer's markets are nice because you can talk to the farmer about what they use to manage pests and weeds.

The plant foods that you should try to buy clean are listed by the environmental working group every year as the "dirty dozen". The 2017 list (below) includes many of our favorite fruits and veggies.

The EPA sets limits for pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and other chemicals on food, and those limits are not zero. There's no way you can avoid every toxin in or on commercial food, but it's worth some effort to minimize your exposures. Young people and children have the most to gain in terms of healthy life years.

Some contaminants are easier to remove than others. Strawberries are covered in little pores and it is impossible to get the pesticides off (out) of them, so it is important to buy those organic or choose another fruit. Apples are also hard to clean because they can have a coat of parrafin (to make them shiny) that seals in the pesticides. Potatoes may be less important to buy organic if you peel off a good layer and boil them too. Boiling has been shown to remove or destroy some of the contaminants.

A review of the literature reveals that washing your veggies in tap water for 30 seconds actually removes most of the pesticides and fungicides. Unfortunately there are some that water does not remove, including chlorpyrifos (a nerve-gas pesticide) and vinclozolin (a fungicide). Thankfully these are removed by soaking in an acid solution, acetic acid being the most effective. Acetic acid is vinegar. The longer you soak your veggies the more of the chlorpyrifos is removed. My rule is to soak my cherries in a 5% vinegar solution for at least an hour.

Why do we care about chlorpyrifos? You may have heard about it in the news. It was originally developed as a nerve gas by the Nazis. Now it is used as a pesticide because it paralyzes insects. No surprise that it also wreaks havoc on the human nervous system. It was slated to be banned until Trump got elected. It's already banned for indoor use. Dow chemical (the maker of chlorpyrifos) donated a million bucks to Trump's inauguration fund to make sure that their profitable poison would remain legal. The EPA reversed course and this toxin will be sprayed on veggies and golf courses, in spite of the fact that it shrinks and deforms children's brains, lowers their IQs, and is linked to lung cancer and Parkinsons. Chlorpyrifos sticks to fruit even when it's rinsed in tap water.

For the foreseeable future we will need to work to avoid this toxin as best we can. This means seeking clean sources for our produce (gardens, farmer's markets, buying organic), washing it, peeling and boiling what can be peeled and boiled, and soaking plants that we eat with the skin on in a vinegar solution for at least an hour.

If you need a little good news to help wash off the sad feeling about all this poison, below are the kinds of food least likely to be contaminated. =-] Eat more of them.

Never mix alcohol and tylenol. Tylenol’s other names are acetaminophen and paracetamol. It’s a common ingredient in over-the-counter cold medications (Nyquil), allergy meds, and RX pain meds like Vicodin and Percocet. People can accidentally take too much because it’s in so many different products. Tylenol is the world’s leading cause of fulminant liver failure, meaning severe, acute, and potentially fatal liver failure. Mixing alcohol with tylenol is the kiss of an ugly death. When you have a hangover and are searching the cabinet for something to treat your headache, use aspirin or ibuprofen or naproxen. They're not quite so dangerous.

Hydrate. Most hangover symptoms are caused by dehydration. Alcohol is a potent diuretic. You might know this from the way that one beer makes you pee like you drank two. Instead of taking pills for a hangover, guzzle water. And if you know you’re going to imbibe, drink water before you even start.

Take lots of vitamin C. Especially after a binge, vitamin C helps neutralize the toxic breakdown products of alcohol metabolism, and it helps reverse fatty liver disease. How much is lots? Four to twelve grams a day, split up into lots of doses. At the high end of this dose range it will cause diarrhea, but if you really binged, you will already have diarrhea.

Be nice to your Gut. Drinking alcohol causes Leaky Gut. This is when food particles leak through your gut lining instead of getting processed through the cells like they should. Leaky gut compromises your immune system and is a common factor in autoimmune diseases. So eat a healthy diet with fruit and vegetables, and eat fermented foods like live yogurt, kefir, kraut or kimchi. And get help if your gut isn’t working right.

Know when to call 911. If a heavy drinker suddenly spits up blood, it’s time to call. Alcoholics can die when blood vessels in their esophagus burst, but they can live to see another day if you call early enough. If the kids have had red bull drinks (alcohol and caffeine together) and start acting delirious, it’s time to call. Caffeine prevents people from passing out so they’re more likely to reach a blood alcohol level that is really poisonous. Oh yeah, and definitely get help if someone turns yellow. Their eyes turn first.

Drink coffee. You think I’m joking. Coffee helps reduce liver damage caused by alcohol and by hepatitis. It’s a powerful effect. Coffee also helps prevent dementia for other reasons. So enjoy your cuppa joe! It will help you sustain your Great Satan lifestyle longer.

Sunbathe. Large expanses of skin in bright sunshine makes hundreds of thousands of IU’s of vitamin D in just 15 minutes, so get a natural dose any time you can. If you can never expose your white expanses, or if you live where the sun don’t shine, take a vitamin D supplement. It helps prevent cirrhosis.

Take a B Complex. Thiamine is vitamin B-1, and a deficiency of this vitamin causes the severe memory loss that affects alcoholics. You need all the other B’s too, so don’t take just one kind of B. Take a quality B-complex in doses as big and regular as your drinking, and you’ve headed off this deficiency at the pass.

Don’t be stupid. I know it’s hard not to be stupid when you’re drunk but plan ahead when you’re not drunk so that you have a ride, a coat, and a place to crash. Your body wastes heat after heavy drinking, so you can feel warm while you are descending into hypothermia. Take a little extra care if you’re feeling reckless or have a tendency to behave impulsively. Get help if you’re really headed down the drain: we need you.

The irony is rich. The term "snake oil" has come to mean everything that is fraudulent. The reference is to the infamous "snake oil salesman" who pitched and sold his wares out of the back of a wagon to the unsuspecting villagers of the American west.

Snake oil has real medicinal value. It was used as medicine before the North American continent was on the map. Centuries ago the Chinese used an oil made from a cold water snake called Enhydris chinensis to treat joint pain and bursitis. It was introduced to the US by Chinese laborers who worked on the Transcontinental Railroad in the mid 1800's. There's evidence that the ancient Egyptians used it too. In the early 1700's the English had a patent medicine made from snake oil. Snake oil was sold here as a panacea in the early 1900's, but the products sold were probably more filler and adulterant than they were actual snake oil.

So what's in it that's good for you? Snake oil, depending on the snakes used to derive it, can be a rich source of an fatty acid known as EPA, eicosapentanoic acid. EPA is used by the body to synthesize series 3 prostaglandins, which are anti-inflammatory and pain relieving. You can know EPA is important because it's in human breast milk. EPA is effective for treating depression, improving cognitive function, autoimmune diseases including rheumatism, high cholesterol, hypertension, and more.

EPA can be derived in the body from other fatty acids, but it's much easier to eat in your food. The richest sources are fish: herring, mackerel, salmon, trout, pilchards, menhaden and sardines. Fish do not make their own EPA. They get it from eating algae like spirulina, which we also can eat. Plant foods don't contain any EPA at all.

Part of the reason it's easier to eat EPA than to make it in your body has to do with human genetics. Some people have the gene to make the enzyme which lets them convert ALA (alpha linolenic acid) into EPA. Other people have mutations in their genes that limit their ability to do the conversion. Diabetes and some allergies also limit a person's ability to convert ALA to EPA. ALA is an essential fatty acid, meaning that no humans can make it; we have to get it from the diet.

If we don't make it very well, and we don't eat much fish, we need to get our EPA some other way to keep our cell membranes happy. Many healthcare professionals recommend that we take fish oil. Fish oil contains 12-18% EPA. Salmon oil tops the list at ~18%. Chinese water snake oil contains ~ 20% EPA, whereas rattlesnake oil is said to contain 8.5%. Cod liver oil has more DHA than EPA and is best reserved for specific uses, like building baby brains or healing brain injuries.

The reason why some snakes have more EPA than others has to do with the temperatures that they live in. Snakes and fish are both cold blooded, so they have to function with their bodies at the same temperature as their environments. Omega 3 fats like EPA don't harden in cold temperatures like omega 6s do. They help keep cell membranes flexible. Flexible membranes don't get injured as easily, and are able to function better. Cold water fish, or cold water snakes, will have more EPA than those that live in warm sunshine, like rattlesnakes.

The next time someone tells you that a treatment is "snake oil", remember this. Public attitudes and language reflect our history, not our future. Science continues to give us reason to revise belief systems, erase myths, and sometimes to welcome old treatments back into the fold.

As the winter progresses into darkness and cold, every little thing that makes me happy gets celebrated. One thing that makes me really happy is delicious sushi. I am grateful that Sho Japanese Cuisine is right across the street from my office. They have tasty fish and excellent sake.

We humans are part of the web of life in a way that is somewhat unpleasant to consider. We think of parasites as those things that grow on trees and use the tree's sap for fuel, like mistletoe. We know about the parasites that you can get in your gut from traveling. But we don't like to think about the millions of microbes that live in our guts, on our skin, in our noses, and unfortunately, inside every cell in our bodies. In fact, at least of quarter of us have Staphylococcus aureus living inside our noses. This is the microbe that is called MRSA when it has become resistant to the antibiotic methycillin.

Sometimes the things that live on and in us are actually useful. At that point it is no longer a parasitic relationship, it is more of a synbiosis or eubiosis. There are bugs (microbes) in our guts that help digest our food, and also that make vitamins that we need. Mitochondria are organelles inside our cells that were probably parasites at one time, but they were so useful that we came to depend on them. They make ATP, the cash of energy currency in the body. We know that mitochondria were most likely independent organisms because they have their own DNA.

Relatively recently in human history, a bold man drank a potion of Helicobacter pylori bacteria, and gave himself gastric ulcers. Before that we didn't know that particular bug had much to do with ulcer formation. But now we know. And most of us have at least a few of this bug in us. In fact, pretty much all of us have a few of lots of different kinds of bugs that could be dangerous if they overgrew.

We get some microbes from our parents, and gain new ones throughout life. Babies who are born the normal way, through their mother's vagina, get their mother's vaginal flora in their mouths and swallow it. That sets up the kind of biota that lives in their guts for life. Usually a child's gut biota is fairly stable by age 3. A lot of our gut biota depends on what we eat. A sugary diet sets up a whole different community than a vegetable and fiber-rich diet. You can guess at which one is better for you. A stable community in your gut is protective because it stops other kinds from getting established. People with very stable healthy populations of bugs in their guts can eat anything and never get sick from it.

Stomach acid is the other normal way that we prevent new or bad bugs from setting up house inside us. Infants don't have much acid, so they are especially susceptible to whatever they eat. Adults normally have such strong acid that not much survives the stomach and gets to the intestines. But if we block our stomach acid with anti-acids, we are at risk for getting the wrong kinds of bugs in our guts.

The fastest way to mess up your microbial communities is to take antibiotics. The more high powered the drugs, the more imbalanced your biota will be as a result. The more often you take antibiotics, the more the remaining community will be antibiotic resistant. The bug that really hits hard on people who've taken a lot of antibiotics is called Clostridium difficile. It is on the CDC's list of extremely dangerous antibiotic resistant bugs.

In naturopathic-speak we call your body the "terrain". It is the ground upon which things grow. The list of possible infections is endless, and the number of bugs on and in you this very moment is also endless. As long as we are strong and relaxed and young enough, we don't get sick. When we get run down and weak the microbes can get the better of us. Stress from life events raises our cortisol and decreases our immune response, and the microbial populations start booming. We feed them sugary junk, and don't exercise enough, and don't keep our bowel movements regular, and they start running the show. It is possible to end up sick from the same bugs that you've been carrying around for 40 years or more.

There's new research that shows that depression, anxiety, and obesity are linked to particular sets of gut bugs. Experiments in mice and humans have shown that taking the microbes from an anxious person's gut and putting them in a calm person will make change what we thought was their personality. And switching gut bugs in mice can make a fat mouse skinny and vice versa. The wrong gut bugs are linked to all kinds of diseases of the gut, from ulcerative colitis and crohn's disease to IBS. There's a lot more information coming down the pipe about this. Supplement companies are trying to figure out how to introduce the right microbes into people's guts to help them heal from various diseases and mental states.

There's not much you can do about the fact that you will be exposed to microbes. No amount of antibacterial soap will protect you. The thing that will is keeping yourself healthy and calm enough to mount a good immune response. That way you keep the populations down to reasonable levels, where they may even help you somehow. Oh, and garlic will help. Garlic turns out to be the very simplest way to keep your gut biota in line. If you can stand it, some raw garlic every day kills the baddies and keeps the goodies. If you can't stand it, you might need some more advanced help.

Many people have this idea that naturopathic medicine is off in lala land somewhere, and that nothing about it is based on reality. While this could be true for some practitioners, MY practice is based on what we can deduce from what we know and what we are learning. I base my decisions on scientific findings, and not just one study, but composites of information that add to the big picture. I advise against using unsubstantiated treatments, and against using any new pharmaceutical drug until it has been on the market at least 10 years.

Ironically, the treatments given by many conventional doctors are not based in science or even in common sense. Sometimes a treatment idea gets broadly adopted before it has been really studied. Once everyone thinks that is what works, they just keep doing it. Patients demand treatments that have no evidence behind them at all. It takes a lot of information to turn around public opinion after the people have been brainwashed by doctors.

Take chemotherapy for example. Chemo is poison intended to kill the cancer. In many cases chemo causes the death of a cancer-ridden patient. Sure, there are specific cancers which respond very well to chemo, but there are many more that do not. Doctors will sometimes give in to a patient's desire to "do anything possible" to help, even when they know that it will not help. It is in fact easier to give people the poison they demand, than to explain to them why they won't benefit from it.

For another example, take a look at the ACIP schedule for vaccinating babies. While I agree that vaccination is effective for preventing epidemics, there is little evidence behind the schedule. Vaccinating a newborn for Hepatitis C is destructive, not helpful. The schedule for vaccination is based on convenience. Doctors stick the babies with multiple vaccines at every wellchild visit, and don't worry about possible negative effects (and lack of benefit) from that practice. The vaccination schedule bears some research to make sure that we are building appropriate herd immunity while also not hurting anyone's baby.

I ran across this post about statins today. Many people take statins. Statins are drugs that stop your body from making its own cholesterol. There is no evidence to support the use of statins for preventing heart attacks, and they may actually increase the risk of heart attacks in women. They're also linked to the formation of cataracts, crippling muscle pain, dementia, fatigue, diabetes and erectile dysfunction. Doctors give statins when they want to lower someone's cholesterol and don't think they can get that person to change their diet and lifestyle. The evidence says that diet and lifestyle are FAR more effective for adjusting blood lipids than statins are.Oh and last but not least in my list of conventional medical madness is the idea that eating cholesterol makes the body's cholesterol go up. For 20+ years the medical establishment has been teaching that if you eat too much eggs and bacon, you will have high cholesterol. The truth is that your body MAKES cholesterol from pasta and bread. Your body makes cholesterol because it NEEDS cholesterol. Cholesterol is not evil. If your cholesterol is too low, you are sick. People get high cholesterol from being sedentary and eating too many carbs, not from having an egg breakfast and a full and active day.

Just because something is widely accepted as the state of medicine does not mean that it is the best we can do. We can do better. The status quo is for dead people. Living people have the capacity to keep learning and trying new things. I urge you to question everything that you think you know about healthcare and health. Many things that have been accepted for a long time are about to be turned on their heads.

Every year the Environmental Working Group tests fruit and vegetables from grocery stores and comes up with their list of the most pesticide-contaminated foods. This year's list is almost entirely food that I personally eat, so I am very glad that we are growing a lot of them in our home garden. The spinach overwintered and came up on its own! But for the foods that are on the list, which we don't grow, I plan to buy organic. I would recommend that you do, too. Only by voting with our dollars can we change the market. Without further ado, the dirty dozen:

1. Apples (99% of apples tested were contaminated)2. Strawberries (these are bad because it goes in the pores and you can't wash or soak it off)3. Grapes (one grape tested positive for 15 different pesticides)4. Celery5. Peaches6. Spinach7. Bell Peppers8. Nectarines9. Cucumbers10. Potatoes11. Cherry Tomatoes12. Hot Peppers (looks like they lumped a lot of kinds of peppers together)